The History of Cinematography - Development of Film Technique

Throughout the years, film techniques have changed rapidly as technology has developed. The first film cameras used were usually only fastened directly to the head of a tripod, which had minimal, if any, levelling devices provided. The earliest cameras were usually used to capture fixed shots and when it came to creating movement within a shot, the camera would usually be mounted onto a moving vehicle. 

One of the first known film to use these techniques was shot by a Lumiére cameraman, who filmed from the back platform of a train leaving Jerusalem in 1896, and then this technique and use of the train was more widely used throughout film making. 

Robert W. Paul, in 1897 created the first real rotating camera head that would be used on the tripod, this way, he could record movement of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in one uninterrupted shot. This camera head allowed the camera to mount on a vertical axis that could be rotated by a worm gear. This allowed shots such as 'panning' and 'panoramas' made their way into the industry.

'The standard pattern for early film studios was provided by the studio which Georges Méliès had built in 1897. This had a glass roof and three glass walls constructed after the model of large studios for still photography, and it was fitted with thin cotton cloths that could be stretched below the roof to diffuse the direct ray of the sun on sunny days. The soft overall light without real shadows that this arrangement produced, and which also exists naturally on lightly overcast days, was to become the basis for film lighting in film studios for the next decade.'

All this shows our technology has developed and created cinematography as the art form it is today, without technology, people created compromises, solutions to their problems into the technology became available to them, which in a sense, allows us as a student group to work together with what we have and make it work any possible way we can.